Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 8, 1990 TAG: 9004080297
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ELIOT KLEINBERG COX NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: WEST PALM BEACH, FLA. - LENGTH: Medium
The way it is now, reeling from a 1 1/2-year drought that all but wiped out last year's wet season, is the way it could be forever: a river of grass become a prairie of brown.
Where 6 inches of water should be, dirt is parched and cracked. Old airboat trails are snaking lines scratched into the ground.
The loss of wetlands has killed fish or driven them to the few water holes that remain, mostly in clumps of trees called hammocks.
Without water, alligators have burrowed into underground dens or fled to canals, where they fight each other for space and food.
Much of the coastal estuaries, where brackish water creates a womb for young saltwater and freshwater life, is nearly dried out and almost dead.
In Everglades National Park, a blanket of dried vegetation covers what water is left. Step on it and it cracks like thin ice, sending a person crashing through up to the ankle in water.
In other places, dried-out white clumps of algae called periphyton stick to the ground like brine at the bottom of a pickle barrel.
The brown ground stands out against the bright green of adjacent farm fields, where jets of irrigation water arc in bright sunlight.
The problem is not so much severity; the Everglades dries out nearly every year.
The problem is frequency.
It is not oversimplifying to say overwatering a nearby lawn helps contribute to the death of the Everglades, biologists say. The continuing influx of people and the resulting increase in water demand is rapidly depleting the water cushion the Everglades needs to stay wet through the dry season.
Periods of low rainfall historically come every nine years, severly drying out wetlands. But without backup water, periods of low to moderate rainfall are causing the same severe drying.
In the next 15 to 20 years, the drought cycle will shrink to less than three years.
That is not enough time for the food web to recover.
In a low-to-moderate rainfall period, Everglades National Park suffers because water never gets to it. Conservation areas suffer because water is pulled from them to supply residents and farmers.
Long ago, water took six months to a year to flow through the Everglades. By the time it got to Florida Bay, the rainy season had begun again.
Now water pools in conservation areas and is sent to farmers or coastal residents, released out to sea to prevent flooding, or released in spurts to the park.
All but 15,000 of 200,000 birds scattered across the Everglades have moved north from the national park and its food-rich estuaries to the conservation areas. Birds, fish and alligators are losing entire generations. Aquatic vegetation also is threatened.
Some planned changes in the system will help a little.
Under the Surface Water Improvement and Management plan for the Everglades, tens of thousands of acres of agriculture or state land would be set aside as ponds to filter nutrients.
A side benefit is that much of the water the ponds would store would, in the past, have been sent out to sea once conservation areas were full. But some of these areas will lose water through evaporation that would have gone down canals into the national park.
In any event, it will be at least 10 years before ponds are set up.
There are long-term solutions.
Limiting growth simply will not happen, biologists concede. But people can limit consumption; they have been under mandatory restrictions.
But once the drought is declared over, people will return to inefficient ways - until water becomes too costly, biologists say.
A third option is alternatives such as reverse osmosis and desalinization. But with current attitudes in Florida, that is likely to happen only when people, not wildlife, need it and it may not come for another 30 to 40 years. By then, according to the computer models, life in the Everglades may be gone.
"There's going to have to be a social conscience developed in South Florida," says South Florida Water Management District biologist Steve Davis, "where people realize that what they do does affect the survival of the Everglades."
by CNB